


These graces that hold me (it's from you that I borrow)

by masterofmidgets



Category: Brave (2012)
Genre: Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 11:58:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13053549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterofmidgets/pseuds/masterofmidgets
Summary: There are a lot of things to be set right, that long winter after Merida and her mother break the spell.





	These graces that hold me (it's from you that I borrow)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kol/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Kol!

There are a lot of things to be set right, that long winter after Merida and her mother break the spell.

Not the first day, of course. Kneeling in the grass with her family, there’s little room for anything but giddy relief that her mistake is fixed, that her mother is human, that everything will be alright. After the lords and their men have gathered themselves up and made sure that no one lost another limb in the fray, everyone’s spirits are high, and there’s cheering when her father calls for another feast, to celebrate the defeat of Mor’du and the return of his queen. 

One of Lord Macintosh’s men suggests that they bring the bear himself back to the castle to be their dinner, a fitting end to a beast that had tried to do no less to them. Merida can’t hide the clench of grief that twists her at the thought, and when she meets her mother’s eyes she can see it there too - the memory left where the bear-shape was. 

Her mother touches her father’s arm gently, and while Merida can’t hear what she says to him, they leave Mor’du where he lies in the stone circle. His spirit is gone; let the forest take the rest of him, as it did to his brothers’ bones long ago. 

Luckily, the castle is well-provisioned even without the addition of bear, and Maudie, once Elinor has reassured her that she was only the victim of the princes’ mischief-making and not a host of demons and wicked spirits, sets the kitchen to work with heroic enthusiasm on venison and roasted boar. Fergus cracks open another barrel of his best spirits with only a little good-natured complaining, and the rest of the day they give over to revelry.

Merida finds she doesn’t want to leave her mother’s side. After two days of fear and cold and sleeping on rocks everything is hazy and dreamlike, blurred around the edges, and every time she turns away she half expects to turn back and see a bear again in her mother’s gown. She’s too old to curl up in her mother’s lap or cling to her skirts like a baby, especially in front of the clan lords, but she sticks as near to her as she can. And when she leans in close, telling the table how they escaped Mor’du the first time at the ruins, her mother squeezes her shoulder reassuringly, and doesn’t even murmur anything about her posture. Whatever shifted between them when the spell broke is still new, and fragile, but she can already feel it settling into place.

Eventually her father drags her mother into the middle of the hall to dance, beaming while his wooden leg keeps beat with the pipes. Merida gives a dance to Young MacGuffin, who blushes like a maid, and Lord Dingwall, who is a better dancer than anyone expects, and when the music picks up pace she finds her brothers under the table and pulls them out for a growling romp across the floor that sends them crashing into a laughing heap with their parents. 

By the end of the night the old men are deep in their cups, telling tearful stories of fighting off the Romans and the Northern Invaders and declaring their ever-lasting brotherhood to each other, and they sleep where they lie in the hall, wrapped in cloaks and furs against the autumn night’s chill.

So that is the first day. But the next morning, while the men are still snoring under the tables, Merida and her mother go to survey the damage that the bear did. 

The castle servants - at least all of them that could be spared from attending on the feast - have been righting everything that was upset in the king’s madcap hunt through the halls, and even in their bedchambers, the worst of it has been tidied up, floors newly swept and Elinor’s torn dress and rumpled sheets whisked off to the laundry. If it weren’t for the new scars gouged in the wooden door and the bare place on the wall Merida wouldn’t have known anything happened in the tapestry room at all.

One of the maids had taken the tapestry from her when they returned yesterday, promising to take good care of it, and Merida finds it now lying neatly folded on a chair, all traces of bear fur and horse hair and mud erased, the colors bright as ever. 

Merida traces the tidy stitches. She had watched her mother make them, working patiently in the warm light of the solar while Merida pretended to study. All of the best needlework in the castle is the queen’s own hand, from the wall-spanning tapestry in the great hall of Fergus’s coronation to the one hanging in his bedchamber of their wedding day. Merida’s earliest memory is of sitting at her mother’s feet while she sewed, fascinated by the glimmer of the needle. As she’d gotten older and frustrated with her own impatience with it, she’d dismissed the work as just another thing her mother insisted on to torment her, but now. All those hours and she’d never asked.

“I never thought this was something you _liked_ , mum,” Merida says.

“It used to drive your gran mad, you know. ‘Embroidery’s well and good, lass, but there’s real work to be done.’ So many times I had to hear it!” she replies. She sounds just like Merida’s grandmother - a tiny, formidable woman who could bring an entire battlefield to a halt with a single word. 

“You didn’t _argue_ with Grandma Una.” Merida grins. A few days ago she would have been angry, another inch that her mother never gave her. But she can recognize the admission for the peace offering it is. Even if it’s hard to picture her mother as a girl, bony-kneed and stubborn, arguing with a woman who once held off five Vikings with a kitchen spoon and a bag of flour. 

“Oh, aye, we butted heads a few times,” she replies. “I had some growing up of my own to do, in those days.” 

Her smile is fond, like it is always is when she talks about her mother. She looks down at the tapestry, smooth wool under Merida’s fingers. “Every stitch in its place, every piece making part of the whole. Not many things are so simple as that.”

She picks up the tapestry in both arms and nods at the empty wall. “Now let’s get this hung up again, shall we?”

Merida has to drag over a stool to stand on, wobbling precariously on the uneven stones, but between the two of them they get the tapestry up without bringing anything else crashing down on top of them. Hanging like that, it’s impossible to miss the gash down the middle of it, or the clumsy, gap-toothed line of stitches holding it back together, and Merida feels grief pricking at her, looking at how close she came to ruining everything. And then she feels her mother’s arm around her shoulder.

“I was very proud of that speech you gave to the clan lords,” her mother says. “Your father and I - we’re trying to build something at DunBroch that will outlast both of us. The alliance, the castle…you and your brothers. I wanted this tapestry to tell a story about us someday.”

“I - I’m sorry, mum,” she says, and she isn’t sure if she’s apologizing for ripping the tapestry, or for mending it so poorly, or for everything that happened to them, but her eyes are hot with tears.

“Don’t,” her mother says, and holds her close. “Every one of those stitches has your love and courage in it, Merida - that's the story it will tell now.” 

“So - so I’ll not be ripping them out and doing them over, then?” Her eyes are damp, but she manages a smile.

“Don’t you dare,” her mother replies. “No, I was thinking I’d like to make another tapestry. But I need someone to help me with it - it is quite a story, after all.”

 

They’re well underway by the time they see the clan lords off home, the middle of the tapestry already taking shape. Merida’s mother takes tiny, elegant stitches in brilliant red and blue, and Merida concentrates on filling in the flat brown sides of the bear. As the dreary grey of winter sets in, she’s glad to have the tapestry to work on, and glad to have her mother next to her. She’d still rather explore the woods, but there is a kind of satisfaction in doing this, in looking back at her work and seeing it all done right, and she thinks she can understand what her mother meant. 

And they talk while they work, as they haven’t been able to do in years - about Merida’s lessons, about how to get the red dye to take fast in the wool, about the hollow full of tiny gold flowers, bright as summer sunshine, they found on their last ride together, anything that comes to mind. She hears more stories about her grandmother, her aunts, trouble she still doesn’t quite believe her mother got into. Sometimes Fergus sticks his head in, as he says, to see if it could really be them making all that noise, or half a Roman army invading. 

It’s not always as easy as all that. The first few days she hoped it would be - when the breaking of the curse still felt like the breaking of a fever, when everything was bright and different, when they rode through the hills laughing with the wind in their hair. Both of them had been changed, and they never had to go back to the ways things were. But even magic, Merida is learning, can’t fix things like - well, like magic. 

The first time her mother starts to correct her like she used to, she gets out the words “a princess must always -” and then she throws both hands over her mouth, looking sheepish. “- be patient,” Merida finishes for her, and pulls out her last few sloppy stitches to do over. It’s not the last time it happens, and sometimes Merida has to bite her tongue, the well-worn defensiveness at being told what to do still close at hand. Sometimes, she’s sure, her mother is holding her own sharp words back. But she’s learning better to listen to what her mother’s asking, to why it matters, and her mother’s learning better to explain, to let things go, to give her room to not be perfect.

She tries to pay more attention to her history and geography, but she can finally abandon her hopeless music lessons. She still has to sit up straight when her father is addressing his men and remember not to leave her bow on the table, but she doesn’t feel like every breath she takes is being scrutinized, every fault noted for a lecture. Her mother steals jam cakes off her father’s plate and winks at Merida when she catches her, and when the weather is too fine to bear staying inside another second, she doesn’t have to sneak out of the castle, because her mother is the one suggesting they throw off their responsibility for a few hours and go riding. 

The curse upended everything, but it left it to them to settle their lives into a new axis, and they’re both trying. 

 

When they finally fight, it’s over something stupid. The castle gets snowed in just before midwinter, and the confinement wears on all of them. Her father grumbles, her brothers find even more mischief to get into than usual. Her mother is on her last nerve trying to get the castle ready for the winter feast, and Merida is trailing after her, being as helpful as she can. Everyone is on edge, and when Merida, in the midst of putting the finishing touches on the decorations in the great hall, trips over the hem of her gown and shatters a glass bowl, the whole room freezes into silence.

“Merida, I told you to be careful,” her mother snaps. And she sounds so much like she used to that Merida can’t stop her retort from coming out.

“Why don’t you just do everything, mum, if I’m so bad at it?” She gathers her offending skirts up in one hand and stomps out of the hall.

She’s so caught up in her temper that she doesn’t know where she’s going until she reaches the armory door. She grabs a pile of unfinished arrow shafts from a bench and sets herself to fletching them, ignoring the tears falling onto her hands as she works. 

A dozen arrows later, her anger has already burned itself out, and she just feels ashamed of herself. She knows she should go back to the hall and apologize, but she can’t make herself move. It seems all too possible that she’ll go back to find the spell of the last few months broken, all their work undone by a few foolish words, and she can’t face that. 

Then there’s a soft knock at the door, and her mother walks in. There are snowflakes melting in her dark hair, and when Merida raises an eyebrow, curious, she says, “I went to the stables first. Poor Angus, he’s worse about being cooped up than your father is.”

“Oh,” says Merida. “You didn’t need to -” 

Her mother sits down on the other side of her worktable, carefully settling his skirts around her. “I wanted to say I’m sorry. I know you didn’t break the bowl on purpose, and you’ve done so much to help this week.”

“I - I’m sorry too, mum,” she replies. 

Her mother never used to apologize, before the curse - neither did she, too many of their fights fizzling out into sullen silence, and the unspoken threat of resumed hostilities. Sometimes it seems like they’ve spent the last few months making up for lost time, but every time they say it Merida can feel a knot inside her loosening.

“Was that the bowl that Lady Macintosh sent when the boys were born?” she asks.

Her mother smiles wryly. “I won’t say you didn’t do me a favor, breaking that one.”

The apologies might be getting easier, but they’re still learning how to fill the silence afterwards. Merida’s hands move mechanically, all muscle memory by now, and her mother’s eyes follow them.

“Now what is that you’re doing?” she asks.

Merida raises an eyebrow. Her mother had always primly looked away when the weapons came out; she’d tolerated Merida’s passion for them and the way her father egged it on, but she’d made it clear she wanted no part of it. 

“It’s just fletching, mum, it’s boring, you wouldn’t be interested,” she protests.

“Still, could you…” Her mother hesitates. “Could you show me?” 

Merida nods, startled, and holds out an arrow. She shows her the trimmed goose feathers, and the glue and linen thread that bind them to the shaft, and when her mother shows no sign of losing interest or storming off in disgust she clears a space on the bench beside her and asks if she wants to try. She doesn’t expect her to say yes. 

By the time they’re done her mother has three arrows that won’t fall apart as soon as someone looks at them, even if they won’t fly, and they are both laughing and spotted with glue. And a few days later, when the weather clears and Merida’s practicing shooting at butts in the castle yard, she sees her mother watching with that same curious expression, and this time she doesn’t doubt it. 

Her mother doesn’t have her natural knack for it, but her hands are steady, and by the end of the winter she can hit the target more often than not. 

There is a moment, when Merida has her bow in her hand, where everything in the world falls away and there’s only the arrow and the target and the space between them, clean and simple. She used to wish that the rest of her life could be as easy as that. And maybe it can’t, but bit by bit it’s starting to feel easier. 

 

On the first day of spring, Merida and her mother pack a basket from the kitchen and ride up into the woods.

The ring of stones, when they reach it, is as it was, even the broken menhir still lying where it fell, but the winter took all of Mor’du. Even his bones are gone. They’re quiet as they pass through it, and the first wisp chimes like a bell in the silence.

They follow them through the trees to the witch’s door. Merida holds her breath as they approach, but even before the cottage comes into view she can hear the sound of sawing from inside. The crow is perched on the grass over the door, and he squawks loudly when he sees them, tumbling off the roof and flapping into the window. The witch flings the door open before they can even knock.

“No refunds, no returns,” she says loudly. “There’s a sign!”

She flaps one bony hand at a scrap of wood nailed to a nearby tree; when Merida squints at it she can see that “ALL SALES FINAL” has been scrawled on it in paint. 

“And how would I even return a spell?” she asks. “But that’s not why we’re here.”

“Well, I’m not selling you another one, either,” the witch retorts. “One per customer, lassie. If you didn’t learn your lesson the first time, I can’t be helping you.”

Merida shakes her head. “I - _we_ came here to thank you,” she says. “This is my mum.”

She reaches out and takes her mother’s hand. Merida remembers when it was a bear’s paw. Sometimes she still has dreams that she didn’t make it in time, that her mother was trapped like that, brown fur and glinting claws and all the parts of herself fading and dying until there was nothing left but the bear. But that didn’t happen, and now her mother’s hand is warm and human in hers.

 _I want my mother to change_ she had said to the witch at the time, and she hadn’t known what she was asking, hadn’t known even as the spell shattered and all their grief fell away. But she’s learning now what change looks like, what it takes. Fits and starts and mistakes and apologies. Stolen afternoons racing each other through the trees, hearing the wind sing across the waves below. Firelit evenings trying to make every stitch lie straight, listening to stories of the women whose strength she carries in her blood. Patience, and understanding, and new choices. Time.

“Is that so?” the witch says. “Well, why don’t you come in, and you can tell me the whole story.”

The witch holds the door open, and the three of them walk into the cottage together.


End file.
